Bernie shrugged. “Well, pretty much everybody.”
“Like how, for example.”
“Well, I didn’t see this myself,” Bernie said. “But it’s a story people tell about him. He had a hit-and-run homicide case. Real strange one. There’s a radio station at Farmington that has an open mike program. People who want to invite people to a curing ceremony, or buy a horse, or sell baled hay, they just go in and the station lets them use the mike. So this fugitive driver does that. He goes in and broadcasts that he is the man who ran over the fellow beside the road and drove off and left the body. He said he was too drunk to know what he was doing, and he is sorry, and that every month he will send part of his paycheck to the man’s family.”
“Really!” Eleanda said. “I wish we had that kind of drunks. But did he actually send money?”
“Two hundred dollars every month,” Bernie said. “But Sergeant Chee still had this homicide case to solve. Nobody at the open mike station had recognized him, but they remembered he smelled like onions. Jim went to Navajo Agricultural Project onion warehouse and described the bumper stickers on the truck, and the people there told him who owned it. Jim went to his place. He wasn’t home but his grandson was there. An emotionally disturbed boy named Don the grandfather was raising. So Jim had another set of bumper stickers printed. Stuff like ‘Don Is My Hero.’ You know? And he gave ’em to the boy and told him to have his granddad change the stickers because the police would arrest him if he kept using the old ones.”
Story finished, Bernie looked at Eleanda, gauging her reaction. And Eleanda looked at Bernie. She saw large and beautiful brown eyes, a little sad now, the perfect oval face popular for cosmetics commercials, and a shape that looked fine even in the Border Patrol uniform. A sweet girl. This Sergeant Chee must be blind or retarded. She shook her head.
“Pretty risky for a cop to do that,” Eleanda said. “You think it actually happened like that?”
“Yes,” Bernie said. “It’s just like him.”
“Doing something like that could cost you your job. Worse than that, you’re destroying evidence in a felony case. You’re risking—”
“I know,” Bernie said. “I didn’t say he was smart. I just said he was kind.” And then, being tired, confused, homesick, lonely, and unhappy, she started to cry, and Eleanda hugged her.
“Men are so damned stupid,” Eleanda said.
A minute or two later, after finding a handkerchief and wiping her eyes, Bernie looked up and nodded.
“Most of them, I guess. But not all. My mother’s father, Hostiin Yellow. I guess you’d call him my godfather. The one in Navajo culture who gives us our real name, the name we use in ceremonies. We get that name when we’re old enough to smile, and it’s a secret. After that awful business at the bunker, Hostiin Yellow had a curing ceremony for me. A Ghost Way, we call it, and it cured me. So I could sleep without dreams and feel normal again. I think I should go and talk to him.”
Mrs. Garza hugged her again, and smiled at her. “Ask Hostiin Yellow if he can cure you of being lonesome for your man.”
4
Rawley Winsor had put the e-mail printout on his desk and was staring across it through his office window, focused on the distant dome of the Capitol. The e-mail concerned one of the issues on his list of today’s chores. It had added to an unpleasant feeling that things were slipping out of control. Winsor hated not being in control.
Even the schedule for today was already offbeat. On his notepad he listed an agenda of problems to be dealt with:
1. War on Drugs. Haret?
2. Chrissy. Budge.
3. Reassure Bank, call V.P. for M.C.
4. Four Corners. Mex lawyer.
Come to think of it, the e-mail concerned all the same problem. Everything but Chrissy. And now Chrissy had been handled properly and neatly, with no residual loose ends left to complicate matters. He drew a line through “Chrissy. Budge.” and renumbered items 3 and 4, making them 2 and 3. He could draw a line through chrissy because in that one he had kept control himself. He had assigned it to a man who was solidly, and stolidly, under control. A valuable keeper, Budge. But the other three problems had all grown out of assigning jobs to people he had no handle on.
He had assigned a really important project to people he was never sure he could trust—either for honesty or competence—because he didn’t have a hammer held over their heads. As a result 3,644 pounds 11 ounces of his cocaine, neatly packaged in one-liter Baggies, had been loaded on a rusty trawler at Puerto Cortez in Belize, and the trawler had blown its old diesel engine. He had the trawler towed into a wharf at Vera Cruz, sent one of his A.G.H. Industries lawyers flying down there to arrange a secure way to get the coke into the A.G.H. warehouse outside Mexico City. All that represented more than $400,000 in needless costs, and at least a hundred hours of his own time. The cost of developing a secure way to get that coke out of Mexico, where it was worth maybe $5,000 a liter, into the U.S. market, where it was selling for $28,000 a liter as of yesterday in Washington, was even more expensive. That ran into the millions, and it wasn’t over yet.
Winsor made a deprecatory clicking sound. The retail price in the District of Columbia had dropped $2,000 a liter in just two months, the slide starting as soon as that move to legalize medical marijuana began looking serious. If the bill passed, the fear of genuine federal control of all narcotics would spread, sending the wholesaler’s price to the bottom. There was too much big money against it to keep even that mild little marijuana bill from passing now, he was pretty sure of that, but even the fear of it was already costing him. He did the math in his head: 3,644 pounds, at 2.206 pounds per kilo, made 1,656 kilograms. The $20,000 per kilo he could now count on in bulk price to wholesalers would bring in $33 million if the value held. He had less than $9 million invested so far. Even if he wrote off the trawler as a total loss—which it probably would be—the deal would be a big winner. And most of the remaining expenses were in a capital property, repeatedly useful if he stayed in the importing business. If he didn’t, he could rent it to other importers.
He leaned back, away from that, and thought about Budge. It was unfortunate he hadn’t known him well enough when this all started to understand what a good hand he was. He’d taken him in partly because he could fly the company plane as well as drive, and mostly because he had a handle on the man, and Budge knew it. Budge could have taken the company’s yacht down to Belize, loaded the coke onto it, and sailed right up the Florida coast to the A.G.H. dock south of Jacksonville.
A thoughtful man, Budge. Perfectly efficient. No residual messiness left behind to nag you. Clean cut. Done with. Just as the Chrissy problem was done. Thinking of that cheered him up.
Budge had rolled Winsor’s limo into the driveway of the town house this morning exactly on schedule, and stood there, holding the door open and smiling so calmly Winsor had wondered for a moment if he’d actually done the job.
Physically, Budge was the sort of man Winsor had dreamed in his boyhood he could become: six foot plus, quick, graceful, agile, with a handsome, tan, intelligent face.
Winsor had said: “Well? How about Chrissy? Did it go well?”
Budge had laughed and said: “Boss, I’m hurt that you even asked me such a question. Chrissy bothers you no more.”
Problem solved.
The War on Drugs problem wasn’t so easy. It had to be won over and over again as long as he stayed in the importing business. The sensitive subcommittee session dealing with that war was opening just about now. Haret should be there representing Winsor’s interests. Winsor’s interest was in keeping the War on Drugs alive, well funded, and managed with the same bungling incompetence that had filled the prison system with bottom-level dealers and users, and left the big operators untroubled and the price of cocaine and heroin profitably high. Not much in pot. Nickels and dimes. But it was on the list of “controlled substances” and had to be protected.